moderate limits, she might give a wide field to her hopes. Why should
she not add a thousand a year to her income, so that Felix might again
live like a gentleman and marry that heiress who, in Lady Carbury's
look-out into the future, was destined to make all things straight!
Who was so handsome as her son? Who could make himself more agreeable?
Who had more of that audacity which is the chief thing necessary to
the winning of heiresses?

And then he could make his wife Lady Carbury. If only enough money
might be earned to tide over the present evil day, all might be well.

The one most essential obstacle to the chance of success in all this
was probably Lady Carbury's conviction that her end was to be obtained
not by producing good books, but by inducing certain people to say
that her books were good. She did work hard at what she wrote,--hard
enough at any rate to cover her pages quickly; and was, by nature, a
clever woman. She could write after a glib, commonplace, sprightly
fashion, and had already acquired the knack of spreading all she knew
very thin, so that it might cover a vast surface. She had no ambition
to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that
the critics should say was good. Had Mr Broune, in his closet, told
her that her book was absolutely trash, but had undertaken at the same
time to have it violently praised in the 'Breakfast Table', it may be
doubted whether the critic's own opinion would have even wounded her
vanity. The woman was false from head to foot, but there was much of
good in her, false though she was.

Whether Sir Felix, her son, had become what he was solely by bad
training, or whether he had been born bad, who shall say? It is hardly
possible that he should not have been better had he been taken away as